"This morning at the X Developer Summit in the United Kingdom, Matthew Tippett and John Bridgman of AMD have announced that they will be releasing their ATI GPU specifications without any Non-Disclosure Agreements needed by the developers! In other words, their GPU specifications will be given to developers in the open. Therefore you shouldn't need to worry about another R200 incident taking place. The 2D specifications will be released very soon and the 3D ones will follow shortly."

Trying to figure out what goes wrong and where between your rendering code and the end result on the screen can be quite difficult at times.

For instance it's not unheard of for a machine to BSOD randomly with some development versions of games, just because of a specific usage pattern of the 3d api that expose a latent bug in the driver - and you have no easy way of figuring it out since the drivers are essentially a black box.

I know that some kind of catastrophic event will have to happen for the gaming industry to start doing any significant amount of linux development, but things like this can help turn it into a more comfortable platform to develop games for than windows.